Lacan famously said: "The Real is the impossible." We cannot touch it, but it touches us. It is the leftover, the objet a , that causes desire. Perhaps Lacan’s most famous theoretical invention is the objet petit a (the object small 'a', standing for autre —other). This is the "object-cause of desire."
In the pantheon of 20th-century intellectual titans, few names inspire both reverence and exasperation quite like Jacques Lacan . To the uninitiated, his work is a forbidding fortress of mathematical formulae, Hegelian dialectics, and pun-filled neologisms. To his followers, he is the "French Freud"—the man who rescued psychoanalysis from the flat, ego-psychology of American empiricism and returned it to the scandalous, subversive core of its discovery: the radical decentering of the self. Lacan famously said: "The Real is the impossible
This identification is a misrecognition ( méconnaissance ). The ego is born from this alienating identification. For the rest of our lives, we chase this phantom of coherence. The Imaginary is the domain of rivalry, aggression, and seduction. It is the logic of "either/or"—if you look like a whole being, then I must too; if you have the object of desire, you are my rival. Love and hate are two sides of the same Imaginary coin. If the Imaginary is the world of the image, The Symbolic is the world of the word, the law, and the social contract. It is the order of language, kinship structures, and mathematics. Lacan calls this the Big Other (capital 'O'). This is the "object-cause of desire